The core of the ethical breakdown within Wells Fargo revolved around the profit-oriented culture that developed in many of its branches. The implementation of bonuses that relied solely on money brought into the bank encouraged unethical practices from employees all the way from bank tellers to high up executives. As stated in Glazer’s article on the topic, the bank’s foreign exchange management celebrated big trades and money made for the bank and going even further to ring a brass bell in the office when a big sale was landed. Such practices bring to mind the somewhat recent film “Wolf of Wall Street”, which isn’t an image one should associate with a bank. Other malicious practices included opening millions of fake accounts as a front to simulate …show more content…
Such a betrayal of their customer base indicates exactly how ingrained this culture of profit was within the company and has now come full circle to bite them when they lost the trust of the nation following the investigation reports. Actions on the banks part such as demoting Ms. Wardell-Smith while disregarding her concerns show the initial lack of concern regarding the corruption within the organization.
There are many courses of action the company could have taken to correct the corrupt behavior of its employees, including but not limited to: eliminating commission-based financial incentives, getting rid of or revising the daily quota system, and encouraging good work ethic in the workplace to emphasize quality over quantity. If the commission-based financial incentives were removed, there would be not as much pressure on the employees to keep trying to sell as many products as possible. This would help reduce employees’ aggressive sales tactics by lowering competition in the workplace and creating a less hostile work environment. In addition, by eliminating the quota system employees could focus on delivering better customer care without feeling pressured to reach a certain
Employees were using the cross-selling which is a concept of attempting to sell multiple products to consumers. This concept led to fraudulent actions, in fact employees were encouraged to order credit cards for pre-approved customers without their consent, and to use their own contact information when filling out requests to prevent customers from discovering the fraud. " The Wells Fargo scandal was far different. Instead of a select few doing bad things, the unethical behavior was widespread at the bank, with thousands of employees engaged in secretly creating new bank and credit-card accounts for customers without their knowledge, resulting in overdraft and other fees." (Kouchaki, 2016). According to the Los Angeles City Attorney, employees were opening and funding accounts without customers' permission or knowledge in order to "satisfy sales goals and earn financial rewards under the bank's incentive-compensation program." This means that the board members of the bank were aware of that it wasn't by the employees' own wills. In fact, they were pressured by aggressive goals and performance which led them to immoral behaviors. Facing this problem, Wells Fargo bank had to take some measures to avoid bankruptcy, losing customers, or loosing brand
on September 8, 2016 Wells Fargo’s unethical behavior was reveal when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined Wells Fargo $185 million because over 2 million credit card and bank accounts were fraudulently open or applied for in customer names without their knowledge (Blake, 2016).
From big financial and ethical scandals like Enron to WorldCom, Wells Fargo may be the next big financial and ethical scandal. Wells Fargo used to be one of the leading banks and credit lending companies in America. Now, they’re on a slippery slope downhill to one of the worst—and most unethical—banking and credit lending companies in America, maybe even in the world. Wells Fargo has been in an ethical uproar, has questionable ethical values, and questionable principles and practices in culture due to their downhill ethical standards. The company also may have been influenced by bad stakeholder judgment, and are now struggling to maintain the company’s culture. To give a description of business ethics as described by John Fraedrich, “business
Jake Clawson Ethical Communication Assignment 2/13/2014. JPMorgan Chase, Bailouts, and Ethics “Too big to fail” is a theory that suggests some financial institutions are so large and so powerful that their failure would be disastrous to the local and global economy, and therefore must be assisted by the government when struggles arise. Supporters of this idea argue that there are some institutions that are so important that they should be the recipients of beneficial financial and economic policies from government. On the other hand, opponents express that one of the main problems that may arise is moral hazard, where a firm that receives gains from these advantageous policies will seek to profit by it, purposely taking positions that are high-risk, high-return, because they are able to leverage these risks based on their given policy. Critics see the theory as counter-productive, and that banks and financial institutions should be left to fail if their risk management is not effective.
Wells Fargo account fraud scandal One of the most recent white-collar crimes involved Wells Fargo, a banking and financial services provider. In 2016, San Francisco-based bank Wells Fargo (WFC) employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts without permission of their customers. Opening about 1.5 million fraudulent deposit accounts and submitting 565,443 credit card applications allowed Wells Fargo employees to boost their sales targets and receive bonuses. Consequently, customers were wrongly charged fees for accounts they did not know existed. In this business crime scenario, Wells Fargo is involved in paying $185 million in fines and refunding $5 million to affected customers.
As Wells Fargo convicted all the requirements of fraud they are involved to the business crime called fraud, they are liable to their fraud crime. There was a false statement which respectively conducted to the injury to the alleged victim as a result. Wells Fargo has been ordered to pay $185 million in fines, but that's a pittance compared with the $5.6 billion the bank earned in just the second quarter of this year. Meanwhile, the bank's victims weren't just nickel-and-dimed with overdraft and maintenance fees. Many of them took "significant hits" to their credit scores for not staying current on accounts they did not even know about. They will likely have difficulty securing home and car loans at reasonable rates for years to come, simply because their bank decided to defraud
If they wanted to issue out credit cards so bad, they could have just made an advertising plan to suggest customers into getting credit cards with Wells Fargo. The employee's at Wells Fargo were the one making fake accounts and fake emails for online banking. More and more issues keep coming up with this company, for example employs that steal from people and making fake accounts. Something they could do better is do better background checks on their employees. Also, Wells Fargo should constantly be checking up on their customers banking accounts to make sure they don’t get anymore fines or
According to Milton Friedman’s view of individualism “what corporations have the obligation to do is make a profit within the framework of the legal system, nothing else” (Machman, 1994, pg. 57) is what position Wells Fargo took in this case. According to this theory Wells Fargo leadership was acting ethically because their goal was to make a profit which they did, and it was “bad employees” who were to blame and committed the fraud. The Utilitarianism theory by John Stuart Mill states that “utilitarianism is attempting to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. “(Johnson, C, 2016, p. 4). According to this theory I believe Wells Fargo would be unethical because they didn’t do the greatest good for the greatest number of people whom were affected. In fact, they did the opposite by acting unethically to the greatest number of people which were their
While Wells Fargo is doing very well and growing financially, it is important to keep in mind how the public sees them. It is necessary for them to keep obtaining new customers, and to continue to create an ethical culture among the employees. It is important for them to not slip back into their old routine, and not become too obsessed with opening new accounts. It is very appropriate that they are shifting their goals toward customer satisfaction in order to please existing and new customers. Overall, Wells Fargo has been fortunate, and has handled the scandal with
During the past year Wells Fargo, a well-recognized bank of the United States, has been trying to clean its name and the mess it got itself into, when it was brought to the public that the bank was involved in generating fraudulent checking and savings accounts for its clients without their knowledge or their authorization. “The way it worked was that employees moved funds from customers' existing accounts into newly-created ones without their knowledge or consent”
The movie “Glengarry Glen Ross” presented a series of ethical dilemmas that surround a group of salesmen working for a real estate company. The value of business ethics was clearly undermined and ignored in the movie as the salesmen find alternatives to keep their jobs. The movie is very effective in illustrating how unethical business practices can easily exist in the business world. Most of the time, unethical business practices remain strong in the business world because of the culture that exists within companies. In this film, the sudden demands from management forced employees to become irrational and commit unethical business practices. In fear of losing their jobs, employees were pressured to increase sales despite possible ethical ramifications. From the film, it is right to conclude that a business transaction should only be executed after all legal and ethical ramifications have been considered; and also if it will be determined legal and ethical to society.
A company's code of ethics is very important to establishing the expectations and quality of its brand. The code of ethics are concrete expectations for employee behavior, accountability and communicates the ethical policy of a company to its partners and clients. A good business practice is to have sound ethics. Having good ethical practice is knowing the difference between right and wrong and choosing what the right thing is. Though good ethical behavior is something that should be done automatically, a company needs to have a set of rules in place that holds everyone accountable. Over the last twenty years, the country has been bombarded with company scandals and unethical behavior; though morally wrong, the punishment does not fit the crime. The punishments have been overkill. A murderer, rapist, or child molester commits violent crimes and potentially is out of jail in 10 - 20 years. The CEO’s that commit white collar crime receive 25 years to life; this paper will discuss how this punishment for committing nonviolent crimes, such as breaching a company’s code of ethics, are disproportionate to violent crimes that plague the country today.
They were committing fraud by creative accounting, acting illegally when using insider trading and shredding their documents relevant to the investigation. Next, consider the stakeholders. Anyone who owns stock in the company would suffer, along with every employee. Under the values bullet we can assume that they have none. Greed and power got the better of every one of them.
Recently, three individuals were awarded $170 million for helping investigators gather a record $16.65 billion penalty against Bank of America. Based on their action of inflating the value of mortgage properties and selling defective loans to investors. By influencing the market falsely is unethical and wrong. That is also why their punishment was so harsh. Firms today warn their managers and employees that failing to report unethical behavior and violations by others, could get them fired.
Tyco provides products and services across the world. The company is global and diversified providing a variety of products including electronics, healthcare, fire and security services and engineered products and services. While employing over 250,000 people worldwide they grossed approximately $40 billion in revenue in the year 2005. In 2002 Tyco was involved with the corporate scandal where the management mis-appropriated corporation funds. The previous CEO Dennis Kozlowski was convicted in 2005 on 22 counts of the 23 that he was charged with. This is an example of not only a legal issue of responsibility but also one of an ethical issue that the Tyco Corporation has had to face. In the face of the legal and ethical issues that this mishap had placed the corporation in, Tyco placed Ed Breen in as chairman and CEO. Mr. Breen joined the company in 2002 after the scandal and immediately began the rebuild of the company’s name. With the appointment of Ed Breen and his changing of the company’s ethical standards (to be discussed in the next portion of the paper) he promotes the legal responsibilities of not only the company’s employees but the responsibilities of the suppliers and buyers to report any wrong doing. This reporting also speaks to the ethics of the Tyco corporation employees as well as those of the companies th...